Kevin Smith | Chasing Amy / 1997

doors that shouldn’t be opened

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kevin Smith (screenwriter and director) Chasing Amy / 1997

 

In Kevin Smith’s boy loves girl/girl loves girl/boy loves boy-comedy, nearly all the characters draw and write cartoons, and are, similarly, treated as cartoons by the writer-director. That is not to say that there are not pleasing elements in Smith’s slightly-naughty sexual treatise, and certainly its central actors—Ben Affleck as Holden McNeil, Joey Lauren Adams as Alyssa Jones, and Jason Lee as Banky Edwards—are engaging. Although the movie often suggests that the director is questioning closed notions of sexuality and gender, in the end, because of his character-as-type approach we wind up with the status-quo, with each returning to their normative kind—while throughout Smith has gotten away with more gay bashing (both male gay and lesbian) than the most bigoted of cinematic works.

      The film begins, in fact, with a parody of gay male homosexuality, by presenting a lecture by Black cartoonist Hooper X (Dwight Ewell), who in a macho-like rant raves against the fact that the cartoon world, including that of cinematic figures, lacks black heroes. Using the interruptive tactics of his friends, Holden and Banky, Hooper puts down any possible exceptions to prove his theory and to reassert his right to be assertive. In fact, Hooper is a feminized gay man, whose aggression is all a put-on to convince his fans of his militant correctness. In short, Hooper as a person denigrates Hooper as the artist, and the duality of that position is behind nearly every figure in Smith’s gallery of rouges.

      Also in league with Hooper is Alyssa Jones, a beautiful woman who immediately intrigues the somewhat thoughtful Holden. Holden, as his name suggests, has is a kind of disaffected Holden Caulfield, holding back his life artistically (his and Banky’s comic-book heroes are titled, intriguingly, Bluntman and Chronic, characters which may suggest the pairs’ differing relationships to life: he sees them, as he tells a fan, less like Cheech and Chong than as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern or Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon)—and sexually. In terms of the latter, Holden is  an innocent, unaware throughout the early scenes of the film of Alyssa’s lesbian sexuality, and clueless about his partner’s closeted love for him—but then Banky isn’t aware totally of his love for Holden either!

       The scene in which Holden discovers himself in a lesbian bar where the woman with whom he’s interested is at home, reveals just how blind Holden is to the realities of life—and how unbelievable is Smith’s typological straight man-child. It isn’t as if Holden and Banky have accidentally stumbled into the bar of The Crying Game; Smith’s bar is definitely a lesbian hot spot, filled with woman dancing with one another. Even the dunderhead Banky immediately perceives the bar is filled with “chicks” and, with his usual misogynistic suspicions, knows something is amiss. Holden sees only the beautiful Alyssa until she settles into a long, passionate kiss with another woman, at which point Banky applauds, as if knowing now that he has won: Holden will not be taken away from him.

        To give Smith credit—or perhaps to give Joey Lauren Adams, whom Smith was dating at the time, credit—much of the rest of the film appears to be an inquisition of just what sexual differences mean. Although Alyssa appears to be a confirmed lesbian—Holden is convinced she has never been with a man—the two, nonetheless, become close friends, with Holden ultimately falling head over heels in love with her. Although it may be hard to comprehend what Holden has found in her that makes her, as he puts it, “the epitome of everything I have ever looked for in another human being,” we are, at least, charmed by Adams’ acting, for which she won several awards.

         In reaction to Holden’s honesty, Alyssa gives a rather stunning defense of her sexual choice, strong enough to convince us, for a moment, that Smith will not take the easy way out, reiterating, what both Banky and Holden affirm, that all lesbians really need is the “penetrating” act. Yet Smith lets us down, even if intelligently, by suddenly having Alyssa reverse her position, embracing Holden and transforming herself from a die-hard dyke to a “crossover” lover. Her explanation for her “switch” is even fairly convincing:

 

                 And while I was falling for you I put a ceiling on that, because you “were”

                 a guy. Until I remembered why I opened the door to women in the first

                 place: to not limit the likelihood of finding that one person who’d

                 complement me so completely. So here we are. I was through when

                 I looked for you. And I feel justified lying in your arms, ‘cause I got

                 here on my own terms, and I have no question there was some place

                 I didn’t look. And that makes all the difference.

 

     I too used to believe that, that all people, if they might allow themselves, could be multi-sexual, gay, straight, even transgender—that we were born multi-sexual, “multi-genderous,” but were delimited choices by the learned restrictions of society and family. That last is a “made up” word, of course, and I no longer believe it’s quite so simple. It is the smugness of Smith’s assumption that now disconcerts me.

     Smith, however, can’t even leave this politically correct theorem be, bringing back the jealous Banky to do a little dirty digging through the characters’ New Jersey childhoods to uncover the fact that in high school Alyssa was not only, at one time, “straight,” but engaged in a threesome with two despicable males known to Holden and him. Holden evidently can accept that he has fallen in love with a lesbian but cannot get his mind around the fact that she has been so sexually experimental with the opposite sex, eventually forcing her to admit to her dalliances of ten years earlier as if such an openly sexual being must be punished for not fitting into his own moral code.

       And that is, after all, the issue. Smith himself, as his persona Silent Bob admits, was raised Catholic. Banky puts it to Holden in another way: “You’re way too conservative for that girl. She’s been around and seen things we’ve only read about in a book.

        The breakup between the perfect couple is inevitable. But in the process, at least Holden realizes he can no longer “hold on.” In a last desperate attempt to enter her world, a world of vast sexual knowledge of which he is terrorized, he brings Banky and Alyssa together, proposing that the three of them participate in group sex, thus allowing the clueless Banky to join him in sex while allowing his equally clueless self to feel at par, experientially, with the woman he loves. Oddly enough—or perhaps we should say, predictably—Banky accepts the invitation, but Alyssa does not, insisting she has already abandoned that in her search for sexual meaning, and will not play whore for Holden’s predicaments.

       There is no possible reconciliation given Smith’s typological setups. Alyssa returns to lesbianism and her own comic book versions of reality, Banky takes over the now successful cartoon series he and Holden had begun.

       And who is Amy? She is, as Silent Bob explains earlier, the woman Holden will be chasing for the rest of his life, a being of the imagination only. Holden meets his two former friends at another convention for cartoon-making, giving a copy of his new cartoon series, Chasing Amy, to his former lover, while acknowledging his former partner, Banky, with a polite wave, each of them having returned to the place where they had begun, alone and uncommitted. To her current girlfriend, Alyssa explains away any of the deep emotions she once might have felt; when asked who she was talking to, she responds: “Oh, just some guy I knew.” Despite the flirtatious liberations of Smith’s explorative work, it is finally a terribly conservative piece of film-making that sadly acknowledges, as Smith has expressed it: “Some doors shouldn’t be opened.”

     That these same characters or variations of them appear in most of Smith’s films might suggest a kind of continuity of vision, but also reveals that, in the end, this director doesn’t have much else to say.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2012).

Bruce Robinson | Withnail & I / 1987

the panic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bruce Robinson (screenwriter and director) Withnail & I / 1987

 

Withnail and "I" (the latter once in the script referred to as Marwood) are young, out of work actors living in a Georgian flat in Camden Town, mostly without heat. In between their trips to collect unemployment benefits and attempts to gain "coins" to feed the gas and electricity meters, they primarily survive on alcohol and drugs. The last time they seemed to eat was so long ago that, at the beginning of the film, Marwood (Paul McGann) is terrified that something under their filthy dishes is alive.

 

    Marwood begins the film—which I first saw upon its release in 1987 and viewed again the other day—with an almost Woody Allen-like sense of high anxiety:

 

                             Withnail: I've some extremely distressing news.

                             Marwood: I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear

                                     anything. Oh God, it's a nightmare, I tell you.

                                     It's a nightmare.

                             Withnail: We've just run out of wine. What are we gonna do

                                     about it?

                             Marwood: I don't know, I don't know. Oh God, I don't feel

                                     good. My thumbs have gone weird! I'm in the middle of a

                                     bloody overdose! Oh God. My heart's beating like a

                                     fucked clock! I feel dreadful, I feel really dreadful!

                             Withnail: So do I, as does everybody. Look at my tongue, it's

                                     wearing a yellow sock. Sit down for Christ's sake,

                                     what's the matter with you? Eat some sugar.

   So opens this whirlwind of a film wherein an unlikely pair stumble through their lives in a constant fog of apprehension and terror of the consequences. Like most young people, these two are a mess of contradictions, feeling their way through life like blind beings.

    As their witty discussions continue, however, the audience is drawn into their alien world, particularly by the flamboyant insanity of Oxford-educated Withnail (Richard E. Grant) who, it soon becomes apparent, exaggerates everything and perceives no difference between truth and lies. Throughout most of this dark comic tale, it is the differences of personality—Withnail's brilliant self-pity and Marwood's terrified passivity—that utterly enchants us. It is as if Neil Simon's stale comic couple, Felix and Oscar of his The Odd Couple, had been rewritten by a hip Oscar Wilde. Indeed one of the utter charms of Withnail's character is that he is almost a Wildean creation, a man who without an acting job spends his life in an imaginary play of his own making.

     Behind this comic surface, however, are darker stories, one concerning the British class system. Despite his feeling of the injustice of society—"Free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can't"—Withnail is, in reality, a wealthy-born snob, who is so embarrassed about Marwood's more common background. When they visit his rich Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) he lies, suggesting that his friend has gone to "the other place," presumably Eton instead of Harrow, which both he and his uncle have attended. He also fails to explain to Marwood that his uncle is a closet homosexual.

     They have dropped into his Uncle Monty's to ask him if they can borrow his country cottage for the weekend, hoping to get some good country air, food, and perhaps even sleep into their systems. Monty agrees. But the cottage turns out to be a run-down stone building, with little food and no heat. Although the countryside is truly beautiful, the weather is inclement, with heavy rains and fogs. The neighbors are downright unfriendly.

 

                           Withnail: This place is uninhabitable.

                           Marwood: Give it a chance. It's got to warm up.

                           Withnail: Warm up? We may as well sit round this

                                            cigarette. This is ridiculous. We'll be found

                                            dead in here next spring.

 

     Gradually, we discover just how divorced Withnail is from this and other realities. Attempting to buy food, the couple approach a local farmer, whom Withnail keeps asking "Are you the farmer?"  Marwood interjects: "Stop saying that Withnail, of course he's the fucking farmer!" Later Withnail offends a local poacher by calling him, again by type, "The Poacher." It is as if human beings were simply what they did for a living.

     Despite the two men's close friendship, moreover, Withnail is willing to sacrifice his friend at the slightest of incursions. When they visit a local pub, an Irishman calls Marwood a "ponce," in response to which Marwood suggests they leave the place. Withnail challenges the Irishman, but when the man comes forward to face the challenge, Withnail dodges:

 

                            Withnail: I have a heart condition. I have a heart condition.

                                             If you hit me it's murder.

                             Irishman: I'll murder the pair of yers!

                             Withnail: [close to tears] My wife is having a baby!

                                             Listen, I don't know what my fucking

                                             acquaintance did to upset you but it's nothing

                                             to do with me. I suggest you both go outside

                                             and discuss it sensibly in the street.

 

A few seconds later they both race from the pub, terrorized.

      Withnail's lack of loyalty and courage is revealed again when, as the two cross a field, they accidently leave open a gate from which a nearby bull eagerly exits. Withnail jumps to the other side of the fence, leaving Marwood to chase the bull back within.

     One wonders why Marwood, far saner and more capable than his friend, continues to hang around. What is the glue that keeps these two together?

      One might analyze their relationship in many ways. On the simplest level it is simply that Marwood may find Withnail dazzlingly entertaining, a perfect balance for his less adventuresome and somewhat passive behavior. But to me it also suggests that there is something deeper here, something with which the film (and by extension, the filmmaker) never quite comes to terms.

    Throughout the film, Marwood becomes particularly panicky when anything sexual occurs, the earlier scene of his being accosted as a "ponce" being only one of a series of examples. Monty, Withnail's gay uncle, is obviously hot for Marwood, particularly after Withnail has falsely told him his friend is gay also. In the middle of the night, the two hear noises. Fearing a break-in by the unfriendly poacher, Withnail dives into Marwood's bed resulting in an even more hysterical Marwood, who is told by Withnail that the intruder is coming for him.

     The intruder, it turns out, is Uncle Monty himself, who has decided to join them in the country, and has brought wine and provisions so that they might properly eat. His real intention, however, is to "bugger" Marwood even if it means "burglary." In short, he attends to rape him and enters his room that evening to accomplish the deed. Panic-stricken, Marwood turns the tables so to speak by proclaiming that he and Withnail are a gay couple and he wishes to remain faithful. The foolish and conventionally minded uncle apologizes and leaves the room, and the next morning, his house.

    Escaping the rape, Marwood rushes to Withnail:

 

                           Marwood: Withnail, you bastard, wake up. Wake up you

                                      bastard, or I burn this bastard bed down!

                           Withnail: I deny all accusations. [opens his eyes]

                                           What do you want?

                           Marwood: I have just narrowly avoided having a

                                            buggering, and have come in here with the

                                            express intention of wishing one upon you.

 

     No such reciprocal action takes place. And in the morning, Marwood, reading Monty's note of apology, feels sorry for the man. But the evening's events have clearly been more traumatic in their relationship than all the lies, lack of courage, class snobbery, and plain befuddled thinking that has come before. One can only wonder, accordingly, whether his lie reveals a somewhat desired truth. At the heart of this film, I argue, is a terror of sex, particularly of gay sexuality.

      A telegram offering Marwood an acting role, sends the couple back to London, with the drunken and license-free Withnail at the wheel of the car "to make up time"—an act, at least in one sense of the meaning, highly desired by his now rejected companion—while Marwood, for the first time in the film, sleeps. The inevitable occurs with Withnail's arrest, his imaginary time halted.

  

     After smoking more cannabis and receiving an eviction notice, Marwood decides he has had enough. The final scene represents Marwood's leave-taking. Having shorn his curls and shaved, he suddenly looks more mature, as the sets off to the station.

     Withnail again attempts to keep him near—to "make up time" once more—by offering to share a bottle that he has stolen from Monty's wine cellar. But Marwood is insistent about leaving. So Withnail joins him part of the way, bottle in hand. The departure is sudden with little emotion on the part of either man. But, as Marwood disappears into the distance, Withnail turns toward animals in the nearby zoo of Regent's Park, reciting, quite powerfully, Act 2, Scene ii of Hamlet.

 

                          I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth;

                          and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this

                          goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this

                          excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging

                          firmament, this majestical roof fretted with gold fire, why, it

                          appeareth nothing to be but a foul and pestilent congregation of

                          vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!

                          How infinite in faculties! How like an angel in apprehension.

                          How like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of

                          animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

                          Man delights not me: no, nor women neither. Nor women

                          neither.

 

Shakespeare's words say it all: Withnail has just lost the love of his life, and with it the joy of living. His future life, we realize, might well contain the isolation and poverty of St. Francis of Assissi.

     Bruce Robinson is a stunning writer and director in this work. In his own life, Robinson, apparently heterosexual, has been married twice and has children. The Withnail character is based on his youthful friend, the actor Vivian MacKerrell, who died of throat cancer (probably caused by drinking lighter fluid, as he does in the film). The character of Monty is based on the personal sexual advances against Robinson by director Franco Zeffirelli as Robinson played the character of Benvolio in Zeffirelli's production of Romeo and Juliet.

     But even autobiographical characters are things other than real human beings. The situations of this film, Marwood's open commitment to Withtnail and his own lie about their relationship, along with the extremely panicky reactions to any suggestions of sex, seem to hint at a character who, while having turned a corner in leaving Withnail to become a more responsible person in the society, may not yet have completely come to terms with his own time and his sexual being.

 

Los Angeles, January 14. 2012

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (January 2012).

 

Roberth Mendoza | Aviones de Papel (Paper Airplanes) / 2022

visitations from those who have disappeared

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberth Mendoza (screenwriter and director) Aviones de Papel (Paper Airplanes) / 2022 [17 minutes]

 

Mateo (Santiago Cabrera), a 16-year-old, is having difficult times. He now lives with is grandmother Carmen, his mother having evidently left for Spain or perhaps have died. It is difficult to tell because Mateo, subject to visions of her, tells others that she’s in Spain, but is also told by another of the ghosts he sees that he needs to let her spirit go, which may mean she is dead. On top of all of this, early in the story, his grandmother has a heart attack and is sent to the hospital, her religious sister coming to stay with the boy. Never perhaps has the boy felt more alone.

      That other spirit, far more interesting than his mother, was a fellow classmate, Enrique (Alex Orellana) who, rumor has it, committed suicide when his parent discovered that he was gay. Clearly, it must be extremely difficult in a small farming community in the backlands of Ecuador (where this film was shot) to admit being gay. And who might one possibly hook up with in this world of macho homophobes. Mateo, although having a close female friend Christy, is also having to come to terms with being gay, and sends out paper airplanes, one of which has found its way to the football captain. And now rumor has it that Mateo is a fag, almost beaten for having been seen filming that team captain.

Meanwhile, Enrique begins showing up everyone, including in the locker room shower.

 

     But it is the spirit of Enrique, who most haunts him, and stays close to him throughout the film, asking him if he will please speak to his parents, which Mateo clearly cannot imagine doing. But the very persistence of the spirit of Enrique, who at one point dances with Mateo and at another instance  kisses him, helps the young schoolboy gradually come to terms with the dilemmas he faces. As the spirit of his mother comes to sit beside him, he lets loose of one of his paper airplanes, perhaps a message suggesting that finally he has forgiven her for whatever transgression she committed, leaving him or dying—there is no difference since she has disappeared from his life, and now her ghost can disappear as well.

    We don’t know what happens to Enrique. Perhaps Mateo resolves the problem by finding a way to speak to the dead boy’s parents. Or perhaps he might just want to keep the gay ghost close to him for a while long as he acclimates to the new self which he must learn to embrace. 

    Roberth Mendoza’s film, with its many unexplained absences, deaths, and near deaths, is somewhat inexplicable in its narrative plot. It takes a couple of times watching the film before it all begins to make sense. And we’re still not quite sure to whom Mateo imagines he might sending his flying missives. But the utter loneliness of the young man whose mind calls up visitations from the dead just to salve the silence that surrounds him is quite obvious and sadly memorable. Everyone whom he has loved, or even imagined loving, seems to have disappeared from his life, and he has been left alone to resolve his multiple problems all by himself.

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa | I Love You Phillip Morris / 2009, USA 2010

a desperate foolishness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (screenwriters and directors, based on a book by Steven McVicker) I Love You Phillip Morris / 2009, USA 2010

 

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's comic-drama, I Love You Phillip Morris, is hardly a great film, but in its mix of Catch Me If You Can and Dog Day Afternoon (with perhaps a little of Raising Arizona tossed in) it's a kind of delightful mulligan stew about gay love.

      Like Catch Me If You Can and Dog Day Afternoon, this film was based, for the most part on true events. A former policeman, church choir director, and married father of a young girl, Steven Jay Russell (a less than usually frantic Jim Carrey) apparently lives out a desperately closeted life in Virginia and later in Texas, enjoying a close, if sexually unsatisfying, relationship with his wife and good social relationships with his neighbors—until one day, after a car crash, he comes to an epiphany that he was dissatisfied with life. He leaves his wife and child and moves to Miami, finds a boyfriend (Rodrigo Santoro), and begins living an openly gay life. Unfortunately, as he explains, the gay lifestyle is quite expensive, so Russell begins the life of a con-man, soon discovered and sent to prison.

     Russell quickly develops in prison the same kind of skills to manipulate the system as he did on the outside. When he meets a young, innocent fellow prisoner, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) he immediately falls in love. Although Morris is being relocated to another part of the prison, Russell finds secret ways to keep in communication and before long has been transferred to Morris' cell, where their love is quickly consummated and they enter a deep-committed relationship, Russell promising to protect the younger Morris.

     After Russell pays for others to beat a screaming inmate next to their cell ("That is the most romantic thing anyone ever did for me. I love you so much," gushes Morris) and Morris arranges to have romantic music played late at night so the two can dance, authorities separate the couple, sending Russell to another prison. The breakup is devastating as Morris rushes into the prison yard—where he has previously been terrified to enter—to scream out his love for Russell, Russell responding with film's title: "I love you Phillip Morris."

     It is only here that movie really begins, with Russell conning his way through system after system, becoming a lawyer so that he can free his lover, accomplishing small check frauds and false bodily injury claims, and, finally, finagling a job as a CFO for a large corporation, where he embezzles millions of dollars just to support Morris in a life style he "deserves." Indeed there is a sense throughout the film of Morris' belief in entitlement, perhaps because he has been previously so closeted, but also out of a righteous sense that the two deserve to live their lives in joyful celebration of their love. And to be fair, his cons make his company millions of dollars as well; he simply takes half of what he illegally raises by investing temporary payments into short-term accounts. His theft is petty when compared, one imagines, to the real CFOs and Wall Street business sharks. Yet time and again, Russell is caught and returned to prison. Through various clever ploys he escapes time after time (in real life Russell was described as the Houdini of prisoners), using the telephone with his skillful ability to convince unwitting authorities along with several attempts at suicide, costumes, and other manipulations of the system to free himself and return to Morris.

     When Russell is arrested after his business fraud, however, Morris is furious with the lies and deceit of his friend:

 

                     From the moment we met, you did nothing but lie. Our whole

                     relationship just lies. I'm such an asshole. You took advantage

                     of me, just like all the others. You were supposed to protect me.

                     But you did nothing but make a fool out of me. And you expect

                     me to love you? How can I love you. I don't even know who you

                     are. You know what's sad? I don't even think you know who you

                     are. So how am I supposed to love someone that don't even exist,

                     you tell me.

     The two, however, remain in love, Morris ultimately returned to prison as an accomplice with Russell. While recognizing the truth of Morris' comments, Russell plots yet one more large con so that he free himself and work to free Morris. Losing vast amounts of weight and forging prison hospital records, he is declared to have AIDS and, as he grows more and more ill (largely acted), he is sent to hospice to die. Morris hears of his near death, and by telephone reaffirms his love, his recognition that all the crazy things Russell has done have been, at heart, for him and their relationship. They are, as they agree, fools for love.

     The final irony is that the man who does not exist dies—so Morris is told. But when Russell shows up as a lawyer to visit Morris in prison, his lover punches him in the face. Russell again pleas:

 

                   Wait, listen. I just came here to tell you one thing, and that's it.

                   You don't have to take me back. I just want to say one thing. I know

                   you think that we were nothing but a lie, but underneath all those

                   lies, there was always something that was real. I thought about what

                   you said to me. You said you don't know who I am, but I know now. I

                   know who I am. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a CFO, I'm not a cop,

                   I'm not an escape artist. Those Steven Russells are dead. Now all

                   that's important is the man that loves you. And if you could see that,

                   believe it, I promise I'll never be anything else ever again.

 

Morris' response: "How do I know you're not bullshitting me again?" is answered with the inevitable: "You don't."

     In fact, Russell does try as a lawyer to free his friend once again, but in the process is recognized. This time he is returned to prison for 140 years, and the real Steven Jay Russell remains in prison, in complete isolation, today.

     Morris was released. But in the last scene Russell is still dreaming of his friend, imagining himself running from the guards in a final race toward love.

     What began as a comedy has ended in a kind of tragedy. For the man who sought so much out of his life has ended up with absolutely nothing. Whether or not he "deserves" better, the American system of justice will not forgive such a desperate foolishness.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2012).